#maybe im wrong! maybe toktik or tweeter has a 'followers online' feature im blissfully unaware of

[phantomrose96]

I find it kind of interesting that none of the big social media seem to have implemented a "x number of your followers are online" feature.

Like to be clear I don't want it or care. But I'm just positive that the more influencer-y type of social media users would want it, and have definitely asked for it. Most social media sites already have a "show if someone's online" feature so the information is seemingly there.

It's possible it could be prohibitively difficult to implement. Like maybe the cost of pinging for online status is one thing when it's for a list of ~20-ish "most recent chats", but another if it's trying to read through (and refresh) the statuses for a list of several-million followers. I don't fully believe that, though. I think engineers could work a bit of magic with look-up tables, decent caching, subscribed event listeners for follower keys, and queued events for changed statuses that only fire off at set intervals. And if they're willing to fuzz the numbers they could just take a random sample of followers and scale the number.

I'm more inclined to believe that it doesn't exist because it would be detrimental to the social media site itself. Maybe user engagement would go down during any "non-optimal" time of day since users would know when they're not maxing out on online followers. It could create a feedback loop of "I won't post at 4pm since that's not when most of my followers are online" -> "I won't go online at 4pm because my feed is dead and no one is posting."

I wonder if it could discourage use all together. For an account with 10,000 followers, maybe 5,000 are dead accounts, 2,500 are bots, 1,500 are people who only check the website once a week or so, and among the remaining 1,000 who are daily users maybe only 50-100 of them are online at a given moment. You're probably gonna get a lot more engagement from someone who thinks they're posting for an audience of 10,000 rather than an audience of 50.

Hell, maybe it would be bad news for attracting advertisers! If a website is trying to boast "we have hundreds of millions of users", a metric like online followers might tip their hand and bring into question how many of those hundreds of millions are dead accounts or bots.

Anyway I just think it's interesting that for social media sites will actually never be interested in implementing a feature that does not please its advertisers first. You are both the customer and the product, but mostly the product. Features aren't added based on what you want. They're added based on what will keep you around.

#shut up chrissy #maybe im wrong! maybe toktik or tweeter has a 'followers online' feature im blissfully unaware of #but as far as i know they don't #ive never heard of it #the only one im aware of is reddit - where individual subreddits show number of subscribed users online #but thats not for your own account. thats for subreddits #and reddit itself is uniquely decentralized from the user. you dont have a 'follower count' on reddit #its all about community board discussions #so it feels like a different ballgame entirely